


Village by the Sea/Familiarity

by Kuronrko98



Category: These Treacherous Tides - D.N. Bryn
Genre: Blood, Gen, Sirens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:41:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21638281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuronrko98/pseuds/Kuronrko98
Summary: A cozy human village sits on a sheltered bay. The humans while the days away without much thought to the dangers the ocean is known to hold.After all, sirens haven't been seen on this reef in years.
Kudos: 2





	1. Village by the Sea

The precursor of dawn stains the very edges of the sky, the only sign of time passing in the early morning on the beach. Wind spreads palm fronds, wide brushes to blot fading stars from the sky. A shrill bird cries from a hidden nest, a familiar sound.

The fishermen take the bird to tell them it is time to rise. An hour from now, most of them will leave their homes with doors unlocked and hands lifted in tired greetings en route to their respective vessels.

After that, the village will begin to rise. 

The light will slant through windows and wake parents, who will prepare for the little ones to be woken by creaking footsteps and hushed laughter. Elders will wake to the cry of gulls on their sills. They will shake their heads and grumble, but this will not stop them from throwing breakfast scraps to the birds soon after.

The rest will follow, woken by this or that. A particularly loud wave, a child’s rock against their wall. The smell of cooking food in the community center, or perhaps the squawk of an indignant gull stuck by a misthrown piece of smoked squid.

All of this over the next few hours, but for now the bird cries and the village by the sea is silent. Only one has left her home, only one is ready for a daily ritual of her own. A rebreather, a light strapped to her head, and a reef full of corners to explore. Secret and hidden treasures under her floorboards, more to discover under the waves.

She plods along the edge of the water with a stick in her hand. She trails it in the sand, a track that will be gone long before the boats leave the docks. She hums in harmony with the sway of the surf, just another piece of the music made by the waves, the trees, the flutter of the wind.

She stops before the light on the horizon can shift from the barest navy to even a hint of the vibrant sunrise the island boasts. She strips, by muscle memory alone dons her wetsuit and rebreather, and cuts into the water in what could still barely be named as the light of dawn.

She stays close to shore at first, but branches out as the light rises. The life beneath the water doesn’t wait for the light of day. She watches the color come into the smallest of fish as the coral she skirts morphs from looming shadows into the shelves full of life she’s come to know them as.

When she finally reaches it, it’s the first time she’s been to this corner of the reef. The drop at the very edge, the darkness that no amount of sunlight will break. She’s stared into it before, but this edge is new.

She pushes down, along the edge of the reef. Rough coral under her fingers, under the thin wraps around her feet. Light seeps into the world, turning the coral from that dawn blue into the brilliant reds and yellows they are. Shadows still reach, too deep for her to see what may hide there, but she’s not scared.

Old enough to do what she does, young enough to feel invincible.

An old lure rests in a crook a few layers down, deep enough in the dark to ensure only the shine of the trash would betray it. She forces against the will of the water, further down. She doesn’t want to go too far, but she can get her prize before she makes her way back to shore.

She strains, her fingertips just inches away when she feels something brush her ankle.

She jerks up, but the gentle touch turns into a tight, biting grip.

Her headlamp sends blinding light this way and that before it settles on the mess of a net caught fast around her ankle. She tentatively pulls again, but it holds and tugs. The net won’t snap, any child in her village knows that, it would slice her foot off rather than freeing her.

Her subsequent and frustrating search of her surroundings for a sharp rock, a bit of coral, something useful, ends when she catches sight of something much worse than a net.

The light of her lamp touches its fins, speckles and dots that kept it nearly invisible bear more than a passing resemblance to the eels that trailed through the reef. Much bigger, though, likely bigger than the adults in her village with a massive tail coiled around to hide most of its body. It shifts, raises its head and yawns in the morning light. Razor sharp teeth glint in the light.

A siren.

The girl reaches up and switches her lamp off. She presses tight against the coral and hopes to remain unnoticed.

Now, sirens haven’t been seen on these shores in some time. They used to be something of a problem until, well. They just disappeared, long before this little girl was born. No more missing fisherman, no more lost children.

Still, that doesn’t keep the stories from being told. It doesn’t keep parents from using sirens to warn their children away from the waves. She’s heard it all and now she has nowhere to go.

She doesn’t watch the siren approach, tries not to think about the marvel that is the gentle song it sings. She won’t wonder until later why that song doesn’t steal her mind from her, leave her helpless to be torn apart by the siren that shouldn’t be there.

She looks back, once, to find it only inches away.

Everything moves too fast.

She flinches, the net bites into her ankle. The siren is there, then it isn’t.

Next thing she knows, she’s gasping for breath on the surface with the rebreather around her neck, much further from the shore than she would like.

She walks into her home with a haunted look and bloody foot before the parents of the village wake. She shakes, she hides her gear under her bed to gather dust in the weeks to follow.

Most notably, she tells no one of the siren in the reef.


	2. Familiarity

They’d grown accustomed to humans in their territory.

Their old pod had abandoned the reef when it grew clear that the small settlement on shore was to be permanent, but, well. They enjoyed the particular way the sun turned coral to fire in the early hours of the morning. The familiarity they had with the sharks around the other end of the island. They could live near the humans if it meant keeping their home.

They remained, alone save for the humans and their harmless splashing.

A yawn split the darkness of their coral shelf. The barest hint of the sunrise broke through the water, enough to force them out of sleep.

Or, perhaps, it had been the eyes on them.

A young human clung to a bit of rock in a poor attempt at camouflage and watched them with steady eyes. It sent a cloud of bubbles back to the surface air it belonged in with every aided breath. It shrunk back when they shuffled and knocked silt from the shelf only just small enough to keep them from drifting in the open ocean.

 _Don’t you know what sirens do to humans?_ they sang, too soft and too beautiful for a human to grasp.

When it remained, they sighed, turned an exasperated side-eye into the abyss below, and unfolded themself from the safety of their perch. They kept an eye on the human, who didn’t pull back more than it already had. It was in plain view in moments, an oversized barnacle on the rock face.

They approached slowly. Their serpentine tail trailed a ghostly banner in the growing light, a curious melody in the air. Surely the human could hear it. Surely it knew what a siren’s song meant.

It didn’t move, and it wasn’t until they were close enough to discern its fear that they saw why.

A tangled net stuck on the coral dug angry lines in its leg. Too tight to pull away, too complex to untie. A sad joke with a bloody punchline waiting to happen. It held tight to the rock, eyes locked on the spotted siren.

They tilted their head and drew closer still. They drifted around the young thing, eyes on the net rather than the way it tensed and tried to shrink further back. It only got a deeper cut and a taste of blood in the water for its trouble.

The siren lunged down.

A long trail of bubbles rose toward the light.

They watched the human dart toward the surface with the torn and useless net wadded in their hands. It had been scared of them, as it should have been.

But they’d grown accustomed to humans in their territory.

**Author's Note:**

> I got an assignment in my fiction writing class to write some flash fan fiction and ended up writing Familiarity based on the These Treacherous Tides series. Then I got another assignment to write one of our pieces from another point of view and The Village by the Sea came out of that.
> 
> Also??? Is this the first TTT fic on the archive? What?
> 
> You can find D.N. Bryn, the author of TTT on twitter here: https://twitter.com/DN_Bryn


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